The reportedly 223 schoolgirls missing
from Chibok, northern Nigeria, for three weeks now and snatched by
Islamist extremists Boko Haram (meaning “Western education is forbidden”
or “sinful”) are just beginning to make an international blip, to gain
traction.

Neighborhood activists have called for
City Councilman Christopher Smitherman’s ouster as a committee chairman
in light of comments he recently made accusing black people of not doing
enough to stop violence.

The best parts of growing older are experience, grace, laughter, wisdom and memories and growing older
itself because the alternative is death and I wouldn’t trade the
raggedy edges of my sometimes uncertain life for all the death I once
lusted for.

There is a chasm between the law, love,
marriage and homosexuality in America, but they keep bumping into one
another like they’re on the prowl in a gay bar: doing that Stranger
Tango — checking one another out from a distance until one makes The
Move.

Twenty years ago this month images from
Rwanda were telecast around the world, and they were images of bones —
bones bleached white by the sun and drained dry of blood and flesh —
littering roadsides, piled in open graves, stacked in abandoned churches
and markets and washed up along the shore lines of small bodies of
water.